Monthly Archives: October 2015

An IT industry analyst article published by SearchServerVirtualization.

Could containers dethrone virtual machines as the next generation compute architecture? I’ve heard many industry folks say that containers are moving faster into real deployments than almost any previous technology, driven by application developers, DevOps and business-side folks looking for agility as much as IT needs efficiency and scale.

Containers were one of the hottest topics at VMworld 2015. VMware clearly sees a near-term mash-up of virtual machines and containers coming quickly to corporate data centers. And IT organizations still need to uphold security and data management requirements — even with containerized applications. VMware has done a bang-up job of delivering that on the VM side, and now it’s weighed in with designs that extend its virtualization and cloud management solutions to support (and, we think, ultimately assimilate) enterprise containerization projects.

VMware’s new vSphere Integrated Containers (VICs) make managing and securing containers, which in this case are running nested in virtual machines (called “virtual container hosts”), pretty much the same as managing and securing traditional VMs. The VICs show up in VMware management tools as first-class IT managed objects equivalent to VMs, and inherit much of what of vSphere offers to virtual machine management, including robust security. This makes container adoption something every VMware customer can simply slide into.

However, here at Taneja Group we think the real turning point for container adoption will be when containers move beyond being simply stateless compute engines and deal directly with persistent data.

An IT industry analyst article published by SearchSolidStateStorage.

A few months ago, Taneja Group surveyed 694 enterprise IT folks (about half in management, half in architecture/operations) about their storage acceleration and performance needs, perceptions and plans. Of course, examining the role and future of flash storage was a big part of our analysis of the flash storage market.

One of the key questions we asked was if they each thought that all-flash arrays would be used for all tier 1 workloads in the enterprise data center by the end of 2017, less than two years out. We found that 18% agreed without qualification, while another 35% agreed but thought they might need more time to accommodate natural storage refresh cycles. Together, that’s a majority of 53% firmly in the all-flash future camp, while only 10% outright disagreed that all-flash was going to be the dominant future storage platform.

Of course “tier 1” can mean different things to different folks, but people generally agree that tier 1 is their primary application storage powering key business processes. We followed up with several vendors about their all-flash future footprint visions and, unsurprisingly, we found broader, more inclusive descriptions. In general, all-flash array vendors think that all tier 1 and tier 2 data center storage could be on all-flash, while vendors with wider portfolios — including traditional storage and hybrids — have naturally hedged their bets on the flash storage market to “let” the client obtain what they see as best fitting their needs.

RT @TruthinIT: There's no cost of goods like a traditional NAS device where I've got disks I've got to pay for. And if I'm not using the data on those disks, I still got to pay for those disks. bit.ly/2BBX073@Nasuni@smworldbigdata

In 30 min I'm interviewing @Cohesity (and customer) on @TruthinIT about Mass Data Fragmentation. It's about having too many copies in about four or five different "dimensions", including cloud! Join us webcast (12.11.18) @ 1pmET (and there will be prizes) bit.ly/2PdqrQn